Last week, representatives of many of the world’s leading cities – including London, Boston, Mexico City, Barcelona and Christchurch – came to San Francisco to learn from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs about how to make their cities smarter. One of the people behind this LLGA Cities Summit was the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, formerly the chairman of Technorati and now one of the… → Read More
In his acclaimed new book, Who Owns The Future?, which is out today, Lanier takes Silicon Valley to task for monopolizing ownership of the future. → Read More
To be “Morozoved” is to be savaged in 16,000 word critiques that seek to destroy the reputations of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest. So why, I asked Morozov, does he indulge in these types of intellectual blitzkriegs? “The whole debate is a nonsense,” he explains, laying out the foundations of his new book To Save Everything, Click Here. → Read More
We all suffered from something called Future Shock – a condition that, according to best-selling writer Alvin Toeffler, made us unable to deal with the pace of technological change. Today, however, our shock with the future has been replaced with present shock. That, at least, is the view of the contemporary Toeffler, Douglas Rushkoff, who has just written the much lauded Present Shock: When… → Read More
Intel is one of those rare tech companies – IBM also comes to mind – that has successfully reinvented itself with each new wave of technological disruption. So, in our post-PC, networked age, how should we define Intel now? According to their new CIO, Kim Stevenson, Intel is a “computing company” that is now trying to be “startup-like”. And one disruptive area that Stevenson believes is… → Read More
In his new book, Marketplace 3.0; Rewriting the Rules of Borderless Business, Mikitani lays out his vision for the future of online retailing. As he told me, buying products online will be marked by a shift away from what he calls “standardization” toward a more customized experience. → Read More
Finally, our secret is out. Today, Deborah Perry Piscione’s much anticipated new book Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Can Learn From The Innovation Capital Of The World is being published. As Piscione told me, the real secret of Silicon Valley lies in our absence of hierarchy. In contrast with New York, Silicon Valley is obsessed with “ideas” rather than with “greed” or “power”. → Read More
This new book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think - written by Oxford University professor Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and The Economist journalist Ken Cukier – is the definitive guide to a new age which, both authors promise, is going to revolutionize the way we live, work and think. → Read More
Jon Irwin, President of Rhapsody, told me at SFMusicTech that smartphone technology – particularly the IOS and Android platforms – has enabled a radically new experience for music lovers. As Irwin explained, this shifts the industry’s business model from the sale of product to what he calls “streaming as a platform,” noting the increasing dominance of subscription services like Rhapsody, Spotify… → Read More
The Pulitzer Prize winning technology journalist Matt Richtel is one of the New York Times’ crown jewels. But while Richtel works his Silicon Valley beat during the day, he has a much darker night-time profession. Richtel is also a fiction writer, the author of fantastically seductive techno-fictional novels such as Hooked and his latest book, The Cloud, released earlier this month. → Read More
Success can be determined by measuring the length of our index finger in comparison to our ring finger, Bronson told me about the research behind Top Dog. But that’s not the only conclusion about success that Bronson revealed. Riffing off Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Bronson explained the science of winning and losing, thereby rendering the legendary intuition of venture capitalists redundant. → Read More
If there is one prominent U.S. politician who has consistently staked his reputation to the digital revolution, it’s Gavin Newsom, the two-time San Francisco mayor, now Lieutenant Governor of California. This week he is launching a new book Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government, a FarmVille-inspired riff which lays out his agenda for transforming American… → Read More
Facebook is, of course, built around Mark Zuckerberg‘s ideal of a radically transparent world. Less transparent, however, is Zuckerberg’s business genius, the secret behind his awesome success. But now Zuck’s genius has been revealed by the Intel marketing executive, Ekaterina Walter, with a new Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s… → Read More
The Aaron Swartz tragedy has unleashed an intense debate about computer “crime” and the US criminal justice system. Heavyweights like Lessig, Doctorow, Greenwald, Masnick, Wu and Kerr have all written with great passion about the case. But the one article that really resonated with me was written by the Harvard Business Review blogger James Allworth. → Read More
Online piracy just won’t seem to go away. A disturbing report released today by the University of South California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab demonstrates the economic connection between the online advertising industry and pirated film, music and video content. → Read More
One of technology’s most persistently prescient crystal ball gazers is Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, a guy who – from Summize to Tweetdeck to bitly to Digg to his latest baby tapestry – always thinks ahead of the crowd. → Read More
What was the most significant tech event of 2012? No, neither Apple after Steve Jobs nor the Facebook IPO. Not at least according to John Borthwick, the CEO of Betaworks and one of the shrewdest observers of the tech scene. → Read More
Few people are better equipped to imagine the future of online journalism than Emily Bell. As Bell told me when we talked in her New York office, she believes that online journalism has a future – both in terms of content sitting behind paywalls, ad-supported news, and content subsidized by organizations or wealthy individuals. → Read More
A new Ray Kurzweil book is always a major event. And his latest work, How To Create A Mind: The Secret Of Human Thought Revealed, is classic Kurzweil – both infuriatingly brilliant and brilliantly infuriating. → Read More
Woz spoke at TEDx Brussels this week and his presence electrified the 2,000 people in the audience. Afterwards, I had the great fortune to catch the great man → Read More
TechCrunch is launching CrunchGov, which offers a Congressional leaderboard on tech friendly legislators. But what about the race for the White House – should Silicon Valley be supporting Obama or Romney? There are few people who know their way around Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. better than best-selling author and columnist Larry Downes. And, as Downes told me via Skype today, he doesn’t… → Read More
Earlier this month, I had the good fortune to attend DLD Bosphorus, an event held in Istanbul and featuring some of the hottest Turkish start-ups and entrepreneurs. It was a memorable evening. Held on the banks of the Bosphorus, at Istanbul’s amazing Modern Museum of Art, the DLD event featured a number of leading Turkish entrepreneurs including Sina Afra, the CEO of the private shopping club … → Read More
If New York has The Times and San Francisco The Chronicle, then the digital world has The Daily Dot – the first online newspaper exclusively dedicated to news about the Internet. Backed by the Los Angeles based investor Nova Spivack, the Daily Dot was founded in August 2011. As CEO Nick White told me, the “core job” of the Daily Dot is to “tell the story of the Internet.” And, so far, they seem to… → Read More
Hands up if you know what Ericsson does? Yes, we all know about that Sony-Ericsson smartphone thingamajig. But as Hans Vestberg, Ericsson’s surprisingly youthful CEO and President told me, Ericsson can claim, as much as any other company, to actually run the network. Forty percent of all the world’s digital infrastructure is provided by Ericsson and 50% of the world’s smartphone traffic goes… → Read More
One of my favorite unconferences is the European edition of Stream, the WPP/Yossi Vardi hosted extravaganza held annually just outside Athens. Last year, I interviewed Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s ebullient CEO, about the global advertising economy. And this year, I had the good fortune to sit down with Mark Read, the CEO of WPP Digital, to talk more specifically about the company’s digital strategy. → Read More
As the author of the New York Times’ bestselling Hamlet’s Blackberry, William Powers taught us how to build a good life in the digital age. And now Powers himself is doing just that. At Crowdwire, a Bluefin Labs funded project, Powers is using the tens of millions of Twitter and public Facebook comments to analyze the Presidential election. And as he told me over Skype, Crowdwire is providing… → Read More
Don Dodge is well known to longtime TechCrunch readers. Dodge was the guy who Mike Arrington turned into a bit of a martyr after he got unceremoniously fired by Microsoft back in November 2009. Indeed, as Dodge told me last week backstage at Disrupt, it was Mike’s very public attack on Microsoft which lead to Google immediately hiring Dodge as their developer evangelist, a position he still holds… → Read More
Given the ubiquity and power of today’s online networks, it’s become a cliche to describe the race between Obama and Romney as a social media election. But few social networks have become as explicitly engaged as the 4 million person strong gay network Grindr in pursuing the human rights of its members. As Grindr’s CEO Joel Simkhai told me at Disrupt, that’s because gay men don’t have equality in… → Read More
The comedian B.J. Mendelson is a master of social media. Mendelson was one of the few non celebrities included on the old Twitter suggested user list and has now over 770,000 followers – a number that makes him a genuine player in the social media game. But in spite of his Twitter fame and his more than 60,000 tweets, Mendelson believes that social media is, to put it politely, crap. And to… → Read More
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